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Sports

Southland Golf: 'Strange' Works in the Design at Odyssey Country Club

Golf legend and two-time U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange helped design the championship golf course at Tinley Park's Odyssey Country Club.

If you were to stand on the grounds of the Odyssey Country Club Golf Course 25 years ago, you probably wouldn’t recognize anything that remotely resembled a golf course. But with the club set to celebrate its 20th anniversary in August, the Odyssey Country Club has established itself as one of the Southland's finest courses over the past two decades.

Odyssey golf professional and course consultant Ed Staffan has seen the course come full circle.

“When I first came here in the late 1980s, it was a corn and bean field," Staffan said. "The course was as flat as a pancake, with no lakes or water whatsoever."

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After working at the Bonnie Brook Golf Course in Waukegan, Staffan was hired to work with architect Harry Bowers and chief design consultant Curtis Strange to shape the course and bring it to life.  At the time of the course's inception, Stange had just become the sixth player in history to win back-to-back U.S. Open championships.

“It was Strange’s first attempt at being a part of golf course design,” Staffan said. “He shaped a lot of the holes and decided where the bunkers and other things should be.”

Staffan, Strange and Bowers should be commended for their work. The Odyssey Golf Course consistently has received 4.5 of 5 stars from Golf Digest magazine, and the course has hosted several U.S. Open qualifiers.

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With a beautiful 55,000 square-foot clubhouse--which also serves as a backdrop for banquets and wedding receptions--as home to a full pro shop, bars, restaurants and a full locker room, the Odyssey continues to attract the clientele officials originally set out to draw.

“We’ve always stuck with our core clientele--the every day guy who comes out here to golf," Staffan said. "We don’t have any golf leagues, and that’s by design. We want people to always be able to get on to play."

Odyssey golf professional Rich Santangelo echoed a similar sentiment.

“One of the things that we tried to strive for right from the beginning was to give the customer a country club atmosphere without paying the big dues," he said. "We went all out for them with our clubhouse, and that’s what helps bring them back.”

Originally slated to be a links-style course before the design team reconvened, the 7,100-yard Odyssey course is unique in that it offers some 50-yard fairways--often unheard of in golf.

“It affords the average guy a little more room to spray it off the tee,” Staffan said. “It’s not a roll-up golf course. Almost every green on the course is elevated with a rough in front. There’s no bumping and running. You’ve got to fly the ball on.”

COMING FRIDAY: Log on at 6 a.m. Friday to view a video demonstration from Rich Santangelo as he plays the signature hole at Odyssey Country Club.

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